THE ADMINISTRATION
(See Cover)
When he quit the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1962, Secretary Abraham Ribicoff described it as the “department of dirty water, dirty air and dirty looks. I feel sorry for the so-and-so who is going to take my place.” One of his predecessors, Marion Folsom, an Eisenhower appointee, complained: “They expect you to know everything, and it’s just not possible.” One Congressman has called the department “a nightmare,” another “a monstrosity.” Others call it the Department of Headaches—or, more specifically, the Department of Wealth, Aggravation and Hellfire.
John William Gardner, 54, the so-and-so once removed from Ribicoff (former Cleveland Mayor Anthony Celebrezze came in between), takes wry pleasure in recalling the bloodcurdling things he heard about his sprawling domain when he first took over in August 1965. Then he adds: “I think that people just don’t say that any more.”
HEW’s sixth secretary in its 14 years, Gardner has even more problems to cope with than any of the others, but he hardly seems disgruntled by the dimensions of the job. With characteristic wit, he once described his concerns as “a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” But as head of a department with a $12.3 billion budget (plus $25 billion more for social security), 150 programs and 100,000 employees, Gardner derives pride from the fact that he is quite literally the construction boss of Lyndon Johnson’s visionary effort to build a Great Society. He is a Republican, but he wholly subscribes to Democrat Johnson’s dreams for a better nation. “This department touches every American, from the preschool child to the elderly,” said Gardner when he accepted its command. “It has been handed an absolutely staggering set of assignments that can result in enormous good to the American people. It must be well-managed. That is an exciting challenge.”
Cash Flood. The challenge has been made doubly exciting—and devilishly difficult as well—by the congeries of social and economic reforms to which the Johnson Administration has committed itself in the past three years. The 89th Congress put no fewer than 136 major domestic bills on the books, and nearly everybody from federal administrators to municipal bookkeepers has been overwhelmed as a result. “Our aspirations,” says Gardner, “have outrun our organizational abilities.”
Medicare was one instance. Though HEW officials prepared for its introduction with what the President called “just about the largest single management effort since the Normandy invasion,” there were inevitable bottlenecks.
As the program got under way, hospitals had 50% of their Medicare forms bounced back because of errors, causing two-month delays in payment and forcing some of them to seek short-term loans from banks.
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was another example. Title I of the act, a $1 billion program to upgrade the schooling of poor children, held vast promise. But the cash it released hit many areas like a flash flood, running off before it could be absorbed. Illinois, for example, was able to use only $52 million out of the $61 million authorized. “It’s like having $50 million to spend in your local Woolworth store,” said an Illinois educator.
Focus on the Future. So rapidly have programs multiplied that fragmentation and lack of coordination are chronic. The inevitable consequence has been a withering fusillade of criticism aimed at the Great Society. Democratic Governors complained to Johnson that his programs had sown confusion in their states by gorging them with cash and concepts that they were simply not prepared to handle. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has urged the 90th Congress to conduct a “top-to-bottom” re-evaluation of Great Society programs to repair “rough edges, overextensions, overlaps, and perhaps even significant gaps.” Congress seems more than willing to oblige.
Can the Great Society, in fact, be built—and managed? John Gardner, who bears more responsibility than any other official save the President for answering the question, is confident that it can. A tall, trim (6 ft. 2 in., 175 Ibs.), handsome man with deep-set brown eyes and a classical nose that, according to his mother, acquired its Roman cast by getting broken in a high school football scrimmage, Gardner remains imperturbable in the midst of the tempest. As president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation for ten years before joining the Government, Gardner has long been accustomed to focusing on the future rather than on passing squalls. Thus he sees the uproar over the Great Society as nothing more than “whitecaps on a very deep sea.” And he has gone right on probing beneath the surface.
Besides, Gardner has a commitment to the ideal of the Great Society that antedates even Lyndon Johnson’s. In 1961, three years before the President’s now-famous speech at Ann Arbor, Mich., Gardner wrote in a provocative essay called Excellence that Americans “long, long ago were committed, as free men, to the arduous task of building a great society—not just a strong one, not just a rich one, but a great society.”
Last week alone, he and HEW were embattled on half a dozen fronts in their efforts to achieve that vision. The department:
> Threatened to cut off $95.8 million in federal welfare funds for Alabama unless the state complied with desegregation guidelines by Feb. 28. Alabama authorities had plainly doubted that Gardner would leave some 200,000 welfare recipients without funds, but he felt that he had no choice. “If we don’t move,” he said, “our policies with the other states are a hollow shell.”
>Warned the board of education in Chicago, where only 13% of the city’s 500,000 pupils attend integrated schools, that it too may face a cutoff in federal funds. At the same time, HEW teams were studying patterns of segregation in 45 other cities, a signal that Gardner may be preparing to take action in the hypersensitive area of defacto segregation.
> Urged New York and New Jersey to adopt more stringent controls over what one HEW official described as “the worst, most critical” air pollution in the U.S. The air is so foul, said a Public Health Service official, that “if it were subject to the pure food and drug laws, it would be illegal to ship it interstate because it’s unfit for human consumption.” Or for anything else, in fact: a study showed that Cleopatra’s Needle, a stone obelisk in Manhattan’s Central Park, has deteriorated more during 86 years of exposure to New York’s contaminated atmosphere than in its 3,500 years in Egypt.
> Called on tobacco companies to print the precise amounts of tar and nicotine in their cigarettes on every pack and in every advertisement as well.
>Announced the establishment of a special Center for Community Planning designed to link the frequently fragmented efforts of HEW and other departments such as Housing and Urban Development “in a total program for human betterment” in U.S. cities.
For all that activity, Gardner would be quick to concede that the Great Society’s gravest problem is not a lack of financing. “The need for money is less acute than the need for new ways to use it,” says Gardner. “We vote billions into old channels. If we are going to get the job done, the money should be used to find better ways of doing it.”
Among the Many. Gardner has probably devoted as much energy to seeking new channels as any man in the Government. He is well aware that a strong central authority is necessary in a nation as vast as the U.S. At the same time, among the aphorisms that he has been collecting for the past 36 years, there is one from Thomas Jefferson that he particularly cherishes. “No, my friend,” said Jefferson in a letter, “the way to have good and safe Government is not to trust it all to one, but, to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to.”
What is needed, as Gardner sees it, is the development of an entirely new series of relationships in the name of “creative federalism.” Already, he says, “the Federal Government has established a wide array of partnerships—not just with state governments, but also with local governments, with universities and hospitals, with voluntary agencies and professional associations, and with the whole of the business world.” Under Medicare, an extraordinary partnership has been forged involving 6,750 hospitals, 2,500 nursing homes, 250,000 physicians, 107 Blue Cross and Blue Shield programs, 26 private insurance carriers, all 50 state health agencies and several branches of HEW.
To Gardner, the great weakness in the complex, interlocking chain is the fact that “most state and local governments do not have the vitality and competence to play their role in an effective partnership with the Federal Government.” In all 50 states, no more than a handful of education commissioners are regarded as good administrators; nearly half are elected politicians. For men of superior talents, the glamour is in Washington, not in Albany or Austin; the money is in business, not in a city council or a zoning commission.
Unproductive Clichés. One key to the ultimate success of this process of partnership and interpenetration is the business community. Only recently, a paranoid distrust poisoned relations between the private and public sectors of the nation. There remain quite a few holdouts in both camps, but the instances of cooperation between the two are growing, notably in the space program and in the development of new educational tools.
The biggest role for business may lie in the future, when the U.S. sets out in earnest to reinvigorate its deteriorating urban centers. “In improving our cities,”Chase Manhattan Bank President David Rockefeller recently told a Senate hearing on urban problems, “capital investment is needed on an immense scale—an estimated $5 of private capital for each $1 of public funds.”
National Preoccupation. Within his own department, Gardner is experimenting with a spate of solutions to what he calls the “crises of organization” that afflict practically every domestic U.S. program. “Most organizations have a structure that was designed to solve problems that no longer exist,” says Gardner, and he has been tinkering with HEW’s machinery ever since he arrived.
He has been greatly assisted by the topflight men who work for him. “There are a lot of top executives who can’t tolerate first-class men around them,” he once wrote. “They separate the men from the boys, and hire the boys.” By a stroke of luck, Gardner had 14 top-level positions in HEW to fill when he took over. Lyndon Johnson gave him a free hand in filling them (“Forget about any political considerations”), and Gardner picked men for the jobs.
As Commissioner of Education, he named former Scarsdale Schools Superintendent Harold Howe II, 48, a skillful administrator whose choice reflects Gardner’s lifelong crusade for better education. The ultimate purpose of education can move this ascetic, unflappable man to evangelistic fervor. “The idea of individual fulfillment within a framework of moral purpose,” he says, “must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession.” What rankles him is the fact that so few educators seem to share his concern. Only a fraction of 1% of all the billions spent on education goes to research. In many American schools, says a former HEW education official, the prevailing attitudes are “inflexibility, defensiveness and insularity,” making them “fortresses against the community” rather than fertile forces within it. Adding to the indictment, Gardner charges that “the schools have been all too willing to unload their behavior and scholastic problems on the community in the form of dropouts or expelled students.”
$88 or $88,000. To head the Food and Drug Administration, Gardner named Dr. James L. Goddard, 43, the first physician to serve as commissioner in 45 years, and, if a good many shaken pharmaceutical executives have their fondest wish, perhaps the last. As Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs he named Philip Lee, who found a way to train 225,000 nurses a year instead of the previous 125,000 by pooling the resources of half a dozen separate agencies—without any extra cost.
With the aid of a former Pentagon Whiz Kid, Assistant Secretary William Gorham, 35, Gardner grafted McNamara-style systems-analysis techniques onto HEW’s programs to determine which were paying off best. Gorham is engaged in providing the information that Gardner will need for decisions such as whether money is better spent on vocational education, or job retraining, or increased aid to poor schoolchildren. One startling fact uncovered by Gorham: an advertising campaign to persuade automobile drivers to use seat belts saved one life for every $88 spent; an extensive educational effort to train drivers saved one for every $88,000.
Gardner is also trying to restructure his own department in two ways. Vertically, he aims to consolidate its eight existing agencies into three major bureaus with separate secretaries for Health, Education and—instead of the New Dealish-sounding Welfare—Individual and Family Services. That would give it a structure roughly akin to the Pentagon’s, with its Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force and a Defense Secretary above all. He is also contemplating a horizontal reorganization, moving men of similar skills from one agency to another rather than leaving them to grow stale in one office.
Key to the Door. When the department was created in April 1953, all three levels of Government plus private individuals and groups in the U.S. were spending $42 billion a year on health, education and welfare. Today the figure is $95 billion, including $40 billion on health, $45 billion on education, $10 billion on welfare. Shortly before Gardner took office, Johnson signed two bills of historic importance. One was the $1.3 billion Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which he called “the key that can unlock the door to a Great Society.” The other was Medicare. Together, the two bills guaranteed that HEW would be the real engine of the Great Society.
Today, in advance of Gardner’s reorganization plan, it is still a hodgepodge of eight disparate agencies. In the past, they have often behaved like independent satrapies; under Gardner’s cross-pollinizing influence, they are growing less parochial and are beginning to look beyond their borders. The eight:
∙ SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION.
The biggest and probably best-run HEW agency, it spends $1 billion a year administrating payments of $25 billion to 21.7 million Americans.
∙ OFFICE OF EDUCATION. Once a haven for musty-minded traditionalists, OE was given new life by Sputnik and turned into a giant by Lyndon Johnson. Its $3.9 billion budget is 100 times greater than it was in 1950, and it promises to keep growing. In the past three years, Congress has enacted 24 major education bills that affect almost all of the 54 million students in the U.S. Eventually, the Office may also get the preschool children of the poverty war’s Head Start program. To ensure that Head Start momentum is not lost when slum children enter grammar school, the Office is preparing legislation for a “Follow Through” program for the lower grades.
∙ PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE. With a $2.5 billion budget—40 times greater than it was in 1945—PHS embraces the Surgeon General’s office and a spate of field hospitals, clinics and research centers from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Indian reservations. Its most notable component is the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose research budget has ballooned in 20 years from $3,000,000 to its current $1.1 billion. The research paid off in the cracking of the genetic codes, the discovery of fluorides and the development of a German measles vaccine. Still, the results of NIH research were barely reaching those who needed them. A major shift in emphasis was L.B.I.’s $340 million program to build special heartdisease, cancer and stroke centers across the U.S. to make the benefits of new medical knowledge available to all.
∙ FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. Though its budget is only $63 million, Gardner says FDA “makes up in controversy what it lacks in size.” When Goddard took over, he began borrowing young doctors and scientists from the PHS, used them to help clear up a backlog of 1,450 new applications for drug approval and to review 3,000 drugs approved from 1939 to 1962. He hopes to wipe out the backlog by July.
∙ WELFARE ADMINISTRATION. Neither Gardner nor anybody else is very happy with how Welfare doles out the dole. Only 8,000,000 of the 35 million Americans officially classified as poor are actually receiving some form of relief. The agency gives out $4 billion a year —and spends an appalling $350 million doing it. Reason: under political pressure to keep chiselers off the rolls, Welfare workers often spend 90% of their time investigating eligibility requirements. Most of the recipients, however, are unemployable—2,000,000 are too old, 3,500,000 are too young, 900,000 are mothers who have no place to leave their children, 600,000 are totally disabled. Wide inequities exist in payments because each state sets its own standards: a dependent child in Mississippi gets a pitiful $8 a month for all his needs while one in Minnesota gets $52.50. Despite such proposals as a guaranteed annual wage or a negative income tax aimed at drastically increasing the sums given to relief recipients, Gardner has a more modest goal—a standard nationwide “floor” for payments.
∙ VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION AD MINISTRATION. With an outlay of $313 million, the agency helped to convert 150,000 physically or mentally disabled people into jobholders. Ultimately, they will pay back in taxes more than five times the amount spent to train them. Chief problem: a backlog of some 5.5 million disabled people to be served.
∙ ADMINISTRATION ON AGING. The newest HEW agency, it has a $10 million budget to find ways to ease the anguish of age. One of its programs is “Foster Grandparents,” in which old people work with abandoned children.
∙ ST. ELIZABETHS HOSPITAL. A Wash ington, D.C., mental hospital partially supported by $10 million in federal funds, it has 7,000 patients. Also supported by HEW are Washington’s Gallaudet College, the world’s only institution of higher learning for the deaf, Howard University and the American Printing House for the Blind.
Clearly, the domain is just too vast for one man to master—but then, so are the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. itself. Gardner is no empire builder—but neither is he without ambition. In 1960 a woman suggested that he would make a logical Under Secretary of HEW in lohn F. Kennedy’s embryo Administration. “I’ll be Under Secretary of nothing,” Gardner retorted. “Well then, maybe Secretary,” said the woman. “Ah,” said Gardner, “that would be something else.”
The American Commitment. Having landed the job, Gardner moved into a fifth-floor office in HEW’s unprepossessing limestone headquarters, where he discusses his favorite themes with a free-flowing eloquence that he rarely manages to achieve before large audiences. One theme is the importance of the individual. “The central purpose of laws and government in a free society,” he says, “is to make the world manageable, so that the individual human being may have the maximum amount of freedom to grow and develop. That’s what my department is about, and that’s what this nation is about.”
An equally frequent refrain is “the American commitment,” as he calls it. “The basic American commitment is not to affluence, not to power, not to all the marvelously cushioned comforts of a well-fed nation, but to the liberation of the human spirit, the release of human potential, the enhancement of individual dignity,” he says. “We decided that what we really wanted was a society designed for people.” And within that society, there must be room for diverse talents. In his book Excellence, he wrote: “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
Untapped Riches. California-born Gardner has been pondering those ideas practically all his life. As a boy in Beverly Hills, “he just grew up with a book in his hand,” says his mother, Mrs. Marie F. Burns, 76. His father died when John was a year old, and his mother subsequently remarried three times—once to a gold prospector who had been in the Klondike. Gardner recalls listen ing raptly to stories of the Gold Rush. “In each,” he says, “the central theme was constant—riches left untapped.”
Little attracted by sports until he went off to Stanford, Gardner took up swimming and broke several Pacific Coast free-style records. An English major, he dropped out for a year to try his hand at short-story writing, then returned to Stanford and switched to psychology. Before he garnered his degree he garnered a wife, a petite, dark-eyed Guatemalan girl named Aida Marroquin. When they first met, she knew practically no English and he could say nothing in Spanish but the Gettysburg Address, which he had learned in a class. They corresponded for two years while she was back in Guatemala-and he was improving his Spanish—and then were married.
With his Ph.D. in psychology from Berkeley, Gardner spent four years teaching the subject at women’s colleges in the East, found the life too confining and moved to Washington. He worked for the Federal Communications Commission’s Foreign Intelligence Broadcast Service—ironically, in the same building that is HEW’s headquarters today. It was a radical change, but it was part of Gardner’s ripening philosophy of self-renewal by means of change.
Fellow Philanthropoids. Gardner found renewal of another kind in the early days of World War II. He joined the Marines, served in Italy and Austria and, emerging as a captain, returned to Aida and his two daughters: Stephanie, now 28, a TIME researcher and the wife of a Manhattan attorney; and Francesca (“Checka”), 26, a Washington lawyer who is living with her parents while her lawyer husband is in the Army at Pleiku, South Viet Nam.
Gardner was still wearing Marine greens when he dropped in at the Carnegie Corporation—and was offered a job on the spot. With his ranging, inquiring mind, Gardner helped to lead Carnegie, now the fifth-ranking U.S. foundation with annual spending of some $13 million, into some of its most memorable undertakings. He also helped to establish Russian research centers at Harvard, Princeton and Michigan. Shortly before Sputnik, he got Carnegie to sponsor a study that eventually led to the new math. He persuaded James Bryant Conant to undertake his probing look at U.S. education. He sent out three-man “Jeep teams” to investigate Africa because even then he could see that “it was a sleeping giant—in four years everyone would be crying for African experts.”
By 1955 Gardner was president of Carnegie, living in a modest home in Scarsdale, N.Y., just four doors down from another philanthropoid—Dean Rusk, then president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gardner usually came home with a fat briefcase, went to work soon after dinner. Checka recalls that “when we were children, we always went to sleep to the sound of a typewriter.” Gardner made a point of placing his desk “right in the traffic pattern for everything in the house” so as not to miss anything.
No Tapering Off. A frequent commuter to Washington, Gardner served as consultant to a tureen-full of alphabetized Government agencies, won the Air Force’s Exceptional Service medal, its highest civilian award, for his advisory work. As chairman of the Educational Panel of the Rockefeller Broth ers Special Studies Project, he wrote a report whose title was later to become a catch phrase of the early ’60s: “The Pursuit of Excellence.” He served on education task forces for Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, played a major role in drafting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That act, says White House Aide Douglass Cater, “has Gardner’s fingerprints all over it.”
At about that time Gardner told Brother Louis, a motel resort owner in Carmel Valley, Calif., that he was “tapering off.” But Johnson, who admired his work on the education bill, had other ideas, asked him to join the Cabinet. There was an immense gulf between running Carnegie’s 35-member staff and HEW’s army of 100,000, but, as Gardner puts it, “it is exceedingly difficult to say no when the President asks something of you of that magnitude.” Besides, it was time for a change.
Into the Sun. A man who cherishes his privacy, Gardner once said: “I have strong feelings about the peace and quiet of my back garden and the excitement of the main highway. I love them both, and I hope I don’t have to give up either.” The back garden has suffered somewhat in the past 18 months, but he still manages to take long walks. He used to play golf, but with typical thoroughness began charting his game on a graph, saw no signs of improvement, and stashed his left-handed clubs.
Weekday mornings at 7:55 a grey Cadillac sedan calls for Gardner at his Chevy Chase, Md., home, and he usually jots down his day’s agenda on a lined yellow pad during the 35-minute drive to his office. On Gardner’s desk is a copy of an aphorism written in German by an unknown author: “Das Beste is gut genug”—the best is good enough. Behind the desk is a framed photo of the President with the inscription, “Now, John, I mean it. We must cut down on spending . . .”
Home by 7 or 8, Gardner perches on a kitchen chair, sipping a Scotch or a Dubonnet and chatting with his wife as she prepares dinner. Later, he goes back to work in a book-lined study whose collection includes translations of his own titles, Excellence and Self-Renewal, in a dozen languages. Together the books have sold a surprising 100,000 copies, and he still personally answers the letters from readers, which come to him at the rate of one a week.
Weekends, he walks or sits in the backyard, always shifting to stay in the sun, and puts down his thoughts in a clear hand on the ever-present yellow pad.
Up the Mountain. In his 18 months in office, Gardner has taken hold of HEW with markedly greater determination and sureness than any of his five predecessors. The effect is being felt not only around the capital, but out in the regions as well. Jim Bond, a multimillionaire Dallas businessman who, atypically, is HEW’s regional director for a five-state Southwest area (and who annually donates more to charity than he makes at his $22,500-a-year job), concedes that in the past, “I haven’t always been as enthusiastic as I should have. But John Gardner is something else. He believes in working your way out of a bad situation, not just spending your way out. And he wants to run these programs from the community involved, not from Washington.”
Often the praise becomes extravagant. “The 18th century produced a lot of men who had a truly universal approach—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, and that’s what I see in John Gardner,” says Old Neighbor Dean Rusk. “The future is his business. His object is to anticipate the problems of tomorrow and help people to become prepared for it.”
Equally unstinting in praise is the President. “He has dreams,” says Lyndon Johnson. “He can take you up on the mountain and show you the promised land. And what’s more, he can lead you there.” Frequently he compares Gardner with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “I thought for some time we ought to take McNamara and move him over to run HEW,” says the President. But Viet Nam intervened, and then Gardner came along and proved that he was, in Johnson’s words, “a can-do man.” Gardner, says the President, “could hold any job in Government.”
There are those, inevitably, who think that he is also eminently suited for Lyndon Johnson’s job. But Gardner, who describes himself as “a remarkably non-political kind of person,” dismisses such a notion as unrealistic.
Major Departure. When asked what he considers his chief accomplishment, Gardner places HEW’s wide-reaching advances in civil rights at the top of the list. “For this nation, justice for the Negro is the social problem,” he says, and his determination to attach tough guidelines to health and education programs is helping, however slowly, to solve it. It took a decade after the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision to get 2.5% of the Deep South’s Negroes into previously all-white schools. Thanks to HEW’s pressure, that figure soared to 12.5% in the past two years. So far, some 45 school districts and 35 hospitals have had federal funds suspended or cut off for refusing to comply with the guidelines.
In the long run, however, Gardner’s efforts to reshape relationships among the various levels of Government, universities, corporations and private groups may prove an equally important development to the U.S. Dartmouth Historian Harry N. Scheiber has written: “The American political system has undergone a revolution since 1933, and another major departure appears in process now.” That departure involves a wholly new system of relationships and approaches to Government at all levels of American society. As Gardner puts it, the new modes of organizing U.S. life have “profound implications for the way we organize our society and govern ourselves in the years ahead.” Says he: “We have made the biggest step—facing our problems and the nature of the solutions. We have a sense of what can and should be.”
Groping Attempts. Gardner believes that the old set of arrangements, from unmanageable city governments to uncoordinated federal programs, is dying. “Meanwhile, one can see at all levels the groping attempts to create a new system—a system that will be less wasteful of resources, that will profit by the advantages of modern large-scale organization, and that will give a wider range of Americans easy access to the benefits of our society.” Optimist that he is, Gardner hardly imagines that Utopia will spring forth full-blown once such a machinery is created. He believes, rather, that a new series of “great opportunities” for Americans will always come along—brilliantly disguised, of course, as insoluble problems.